


The Bike That Dad Built

by Cluegirl



Series: Scatterlings and Orphans [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Comedy, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-01-01
Packaged: 2017-11-07 05:50:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/427620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cluegirl/pseuds/Cluegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony's dad never built HIM a motorcycle...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Bike That Dad Built

It wasn't that Tony hated Steve Rogers -- well, not after they'd saved the SHIELD Helicarrier, and then Manhattan, and also probably the World together, anyhow. It was just that Steve had this knack for making Tony _feel_ like he hated him. Or like he really wanted to hate him, anyway. 

Seriously, it was like the dude's superpower or something, because Tony knew damn good and well that there were faster, stronger, tougher superheroes out there (because really, why would he NOT download Fury's eye-only 'Personnel/Asset' files from SHIELD while he had Jarvis raiding the Helicarrier's servers?) But tantrum inspiration as a superpower could explain why Tony felt like punching Captain America in his neatly chiseled face the instant he rolled up to Central Park West on the sweetest vintage motorcycle Tony had ever seen. And Tony wasn't even INTO bikes, really, because hello, no backseat equals a serious design flaw in any straight, right-thinking horndog's books. But damn, was that black beauty something sweet. And maybe Tony didn't want to punch Steve, really, so much as he wanted to shove him over and steal his pretty.

She was in flawless condition, too. Even as he was strolling across the street, keeping half an eye out for cabbies, Tony could tell the bike wasn't some retro-styled kit job. It really was as old as its design made it look, but it was also so gleamingly clean that only an engineer or a gearhead of monastic devotion would really be able to tell that the engine housing alone was older than most people walking down that street. The bike had to be ludicrously expensive. A mint on shiny chrome wheels. How the hell did a recently-thawed government employee who couldn't even afford a decent shirt manage to get his hands on a machine like that when Tony, who could afford to buy excellent shirt _companies_ (and had needed to do so once or twice in the past, for reasons he'd scrupulously forgotten in order not to court Death By Pepper,) wouldn't even know where to begin looking? 

Tony was working on a way to ask that question that wouldn't earn him that patented Rogers' eyebrow-crease-of-faint-disapproval when someone grabbed the back of his jacket and hauled him to an abrupt stop in the street. The hauler was Bruce. Tony knew this from the height ratio (Bruce was even shorter than himself, and that was sadly kind of rare among super heroes,) from the faint smell of weed, and from Bruce's voice in his ear yelling at him to look out. But before Tony could whirl around and dock some serious bro-points on his little buddy, Clint Barton just barely failed to park a sleek black SHIELD-mobile on Tony's best Ferragamos.

"Aw, why'd you stop him? That would've been worth ten points," Barton called as he slung open the door and got out. "No, wait, there's a crosswalk within twenty feet and he's not in it -- that makes it worth fifty."

"Bounty goes down if he's not in the suit," Romanov replied, sliding out of the car's passenger side. 

Tony frowned at them both as he shook Bruce off and rounded the car. "What's that you say? 'Please, Mr. Stark, I cannot live another day without you destroying my credit score'?"

At which Romanov did that thing with her eyebrow that translated either into 'bitch please,' 'bring it, tough guy,' or possibly 'I think I'd like a latte now.' 

Barton just grinned, and asked, "What credit score?"

Tony sniffed. "Oh that's right. SHIELD agents are paid in spite and explosives, aren't they? I remember now." That won about a quarter of a smile from Romanov, and an actual laugh from Barton, so Tony counted the point in his favor and turned to reacquire his former target, who was still sitting astride his fantastic bike and looking like a well-pressed fashion tragedy. "Bruce will explain the concept. I have an adult I need to talk to now."

Steve was looking around, his face somewhere between concentration and nostalgia as Tony left the three behind, but he'd seen enough of the man in action to know his approach had been noted. Say what you would about the man, but Captain America didn't miss much that went on around him. He might not get a damned bit of it, but that didn't mean he'd missed it. Tony won a glance and a fractional nod before Steve went back to scanning the rooftops again, looking for hostile aliens, or maybe chimneysweeps.

"I don't know whether it's stranger when I don't recognize anything at all, or when I find just one thing I remember from before," he said as Tony drew near.

"This is Central Park West, Cap," Tony answered, sticking his hands in his pockets and ruining the line of his suit, "This area's been rebuilt, remodeled, refurbished, and restored by the idle wealthy so many times nobody's sure what anything used to look DOES THAT SAY STARK?" He really didn't mean to shout, or to point and gape, but seeing the old Stark Industries logo splashed across the bike's gas tank was one delusion too many as far as Tony was concerned.

Steve, utterly ignoring Tony's breakdown in progress, just smiled like a proud papa and stroked the handlebars. "Yep. Howard built her for me." He chuckled then, looking down at the black gas tank and shaking his head. "I actually had to threaten him to get him not to paint her red, white, and blue."

"You're… driving a Starkmobile." And damn it, where did THAT pathetic tone come from?

Steve must have heard it too, because he looked up, concerned. "Um… no," he said gently, "I'm pretty sure that was the flying car thing. He never got that to work. This is just a bike." The heresy of calling THAT machine 'just a bike' effectively shattered Tony's trance, but when he snapped his head up, Rogers read his outraged glare completely wrong. "It doesn’t fly or anything," he said, "I promise."

And Tony, being a genius, and sometimes even a supergenius, realized that he was perilously close to looking somewhat less than cool. So he changed tack and hoped to discombobulate. "How is it even still here?" he asked, circling the bike and looking for flaws in the design. "I mean Stark vehicle prototypes are rare as deodorant in the MIT freshman dorms, and they're worth more than-" he looked around, and then hooked a thumb at Barton, "him. Did you have this in a safety deposit vault or something, because I am damn sure they didn't have U-Store-Its back then!"

Steve was too polite to roll his eyes, but Tony could tell by the way his smile chilled and went a little flat that he really wanted to. "The RSS did," he said, and climbed out of the saddle, "They put everything of mine that I didn't have on me when I went down into storage in the archives. SHIELD got it after them, and turned it back over to me a little while ago." 

It was only then that Tony noticed that Steve's battered leather jacket didn't just look like it was three quarters of a century old, it actually was, and the Howling Commandos patch on the shoulder wasn't a reproduction at all. The jacket was lovingly cared-for and restored, just like Steve's well-polished army-issue boots, but it was definitely older than Tony by several decades. Which might have explained the shirt thing after all. "Why would SHIELD keep your stuff?" he asked, genuinely mystified. "I mean it's not like it was prototype weaponry, or blood samples, or…"

"Howard kept it," Steve answered, almost frowning, "Because he was my friend, and he didn't want to see my belongings auctioned off like a gangster's bloody shirts after I was gone. They told me he left it with SHIELD's archival unit when he…" and damn it, why did that pause and guilty little glance of his have to be so predictable? Like Tony would still fucking _care_ about the fact that his old man had, "…died."

But just then, as luck would have it, the SHIELD paddywagon arrived, and with all the subtlety of a Chinese New Year's Parade, disgorged half a dozen agents in riot gear, and two demi-gods into the park. So the setting straight of Captain America with regards to Tony's flinty, atrophied, and all but nonexistent paternal attachment would have to wait. It was showtime, and they were all needed on stage to make sure Loki didn't fuck up the curtain call.

Afterward, when Steve was shaking Bruce's hand, and Barton and Romanov were whispering and smirking at each other, Tony slipped off to have a private moment with the bike again. She really was a beauty. Must have been a curbside miracle back when she was new; sleek and fierce and elegant, shining like a black diamond in a pile of carnival glass. Nothing on the roads like it, not before or since.

The heretical urge to scrape his keys down the gleaming black gas tank was nearly painful in its intensity. Tony's dad hadn't ever built HIM a custom motorbike, after all. And she was practically almost his anyway, having his name right on her as she did. And he was allowed to fuck up his own things, so long as he fixed them afterward, right?

Self-preservation, however, was not entirely atrophied in Tony, because he chose just the right moment to casually glance around and judge his getting-away-with-it odds, and found Natasha Romanov watching him, arms folded over her amazing breasts, green eyes unblinking, and lips so perfectly neutral that she might as well have had her pistols leveled at his head. Oh. Perhaps not. He flashed her his best rakishly innocent grin, but all she did was shake her head once, slowly, and mouth a silent warning, 'Don't even.'

Tony pulled his empty hands out of his pockets then, and shrugged to demonstrate the complete innocence of his intentions. Then he had to resist the urge to back away as she crossed to his side with brisk, clicking steps. But instead of breaking his kneecaps with some super-spy Savate move, she just nudged him aside and put herself squarely between Tony and the Starkbike -- immovable object and irresistible force in one curvy little package. 

And yeah, he should have seen that one coming -- hot chicks never could resist motorbikes, after all, lack of back seats notwithstanding. Also, goddamn, she must have had some kind of mind reading mutant superpower after all, because she did that scary thing with her eyebrows again and said, "Not everything is about you, Stark." 

Some statements, however patently untrue, you just don't challenge. When the poor, deluded speaker is able to kill you with her thighs, there's really no right answer to be made. 

Luckily, Bruce had finished saying goodbye to Barton, and was casting about the crowd in that 'perhaps I ought to go find a shantytown and hide from all these scary normal people' way he sometimes did, so that gave Tony the perfect out. He put spiteful temptation, which was completely different from envy, thank you, behind him and went to collect his new science buddy. He still had some serious showing off to get through before lunch, after all.

But Tony did still make a note to himself in the part of his brain that never forgot things, to make Jarvis hunt up his dad's design plans for that damned bike. Because, not that he'd actually wish for his teammate's prize possession to come to any real harm or anything, (because daddy issues were one thing, but vintage, chick-magnet wheels were sacrosanct in the Gospel of Stark when Tony wasn't suffering from Steve's mutant superpower tantrum effect.) However, if it _should_ ever happen that Steve needed something repaired on his beautiful toy… If someone who was _not_ Tony happened to do some real damage to her that couldn't be fixed with a chamois and some touch up paint… 

If he ever got a week alone with her in his own workshop, Tony goddamned well intended to show Steve that he COULD figure out a way to make the Starkbike fly!

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically a WIP. As the series title suggests, there will be more, and they will be interknit. I'm not positive at present whether I want to present them as stand-alones, or as a chaptered fic. I suspect I shall go back and forth on this many times before all is said and sifted, however at present, each part will be its own thing. The later ones will get longer. Lots longer.


End file.
